Let’s face it: 2020 was a rough year for most businesses.
Many businesses found it challenging to carry on with their professional engagements during the pandemic. A year later, things aren’t too different. In-person activities are still impracticable. So, marketers are progressively counting on webinars to drive their sales funnel. As a result, the webinar and digital events space seems over-saturated.
What does it mean?
It simply means one needs a solid marketing strategy to meet the set goals.
But there’s a catch: With people staying and working from home, content consumption has escalated excessively. And we’re not referring to Netflix binges, Instagram trends, Amazon buys, and the likes. Market surveys reveal a sharp rise in B2B content engagement with increased visitors, asset views, and content reads.
The result: With B2B buyers accessing more and more content, they expect to replicate the same micro-personalized involvement they enjoy on B2C platforms like Amazon, Spotify, Amazon.
So, the rules of the game are changing. Marketing strategies need to adapt and evolve to deliver relevant and meaningful experiences to customers to drive sales.
How do you do that? How do you create an effective marketing strategy that actually works in 2021?
This is where experience and expertise come in to save the day!
Let me share a recent experience.
One of the Series A-funded SaaS platforms approached us to curate a solid marketing strategy.
After maneuvering different things across digital channels, we decided to pursue the webinar route to ignite forward momentum.
You may ask why?
When you’re thinking about doing things differently to promote a business, webinars shine like a beacon in the sea of marketing approaches. Webinars inevitably bring in a string of advantages that make it such a powerful tool.
They are unique as they offer an expansive reach to a large number of people. It gets real, lives, and animated with webinars.
Everything seems to be running on automated programs these days. AI techniques are increasingly being implemented by businesses on their digital platforms.
Where does this leave any scope for personal engagement?
Webinars extend the chance to get a committed group of people together, sharing the same time and space. You get a dedicated, owned audience. It allows you to engage your audience through the multi-sensory facet of seeing and hearing, thus scaling your relationship building.
What’s more?
Webinars make the whole experience relatable via live interaction that canned videos, podcasts may fail to achieve.
The usual attendance time is 60 minutes, more or less. Which platform offers you the timeframe of 60 minutes with a prospect or potential customer? Those 60 minutes, if utilized productively to deliver value, can help build a reliable connection with the attendees. You stand to earn a chance to follow up, generate quality leads and convert them into business.
Of course, it isn’t all a breeze. To present a webinar that is not only seamless but also engaging is no easy task. It entails substantial planning and execution. One needs an effective game plan to implement a webinar strategy to fuel the marketing efforts for the company.
Extracting maximum returns through webinars can be as straightforward as implementing few gainful insights drawn from an extensive experience of having managed 1000 successful webinars for the target base of 140 countries. I love that I have gained actionable insights and in-depth analysis since I have explored and apprehended different tactics to keep my audiences connected and absorbed. My strategy of building webinars as one of the key ROI generating channels has consistently brought in desired gains. My approach of conducting regular online meetups, doing webinars every fortnightly every month while mixing up with on-field events has shown promising results.
Here’s the approach we followed to get results:
1. Setting the correct pace with Pre- webinar Analysis
2. Mapping with Historic Analysis
3. Defining Webinar Success Metrics
4. Scaling up other digital marketing channels
1. Setting the correct pace with Pre- webinar Analysis
Before you can implement an effective program, know the company intimately inside out. Build familiarity with their lead and sales funnel status. Dive into data to get a good idea of who and what you’re working with. Here are a few things that can make a real difference:
- Analysis of existing subscribers for the company
- Lead lists/ contact database currently available
- Lead stages – Marketing Qualified, Sales Accepted and Sales Qualified
- Sales funnel/Sales stages – Proposal, Contracting
- Web Analytics – Unique and repeat visitors
- SEO
- Social Media – Followers and engagement
- Competitor analysis
2. Mapping with Historic Analysis
If the company has done webinars before, analyze the results. Study the channels that worked best, things that didn’t go well. Identify the content gaps. Assess the average view times. Accordingly, engineer an improved, relevant program. If the company is trying webinars for the first time, incorporate the best strategy guided by past experiences.
3. Defining Webinar Success Metrics
We used pre-webinar analysis and historical data to determine the webinar success metrics for the short term and long term. In the short term, we were mindful of the available time and resources. What are the best results one can achieve for the first webinar? You need to recognize what’s resonating and create a series of webinars to structure a webinar calendar that gives a preview of expected results.
We built the webinar calendar executing 3 webinars, 2 Ask Me Anything sessions, 3-panel discussions and a virtual summit targeting 5000 companies!!
Take a look at the webinar calendar:
4. Scaling up other digital marketing channels
The sales team needed a real catalyst to bringing in more customers. A webinar can provide an opportunity to reach out to 100+ customers. With this thought, we decided to initiate the first webinar.
The goal was to connect with prospects meaningfully and score their engagement to produce a steady flow of quality leads for the sales team.
Here’s how the journey began for the first webinar…
The webinar was in 10 days. We decided on the theme and published the landing page in 24 hours.
Considering the urgency and time constraints, we chose a neutral topic – How our solution offerings can help our target customers. We decided to start with internal speakers.
We curated all the activities around the webinar to fast-track our time-to-value. We tactfully optimized all the digital marketing channels to better the performance of marketing activities. This included pre-campaign surveys to identify the expectations of the target audience. We shaped the virtual events calendar to sync up with the webinar to avoid any overlap.
How did all this help?
Due to our campaigns, there was an exponential increase in web traffic. Domain authority increased as people positively responded to our campaigns by record registrations, reading blogs, downloading whitepapers /eBooks, and downloading webinar videos.
We got around 450 approx. registrations and around 380 people turned up for the webinar.
We had scaled up the webinar within 10 days!
Approach to execute, the first webinar helped the sales team to build the funnel of 60 companies in just 12 days!
Some practical pointers we followed to build an effective sales funnel on short time and resources:
- Drip email campaign as per Target Persona
To secure registrations, we planned custom drip email campaigns for subscribers, lead lists, lead stages and sales funnel. One size doesn’t really fit all here. It is important to offer people something worthwhile to read in the first mail to get them excited and visit the webinar landing page and register. For this, we created substantial personalized and highly relevant content for existing subscribers, clients, lead lists as per target persona. The email content should spell the reason for sending the email, why the person should attend the webinar if they have any questions to ask.
We got the email campaigns up and running in 2 days!!
- Account-Based Marketing
We were very clear not to spam anyone. Our research team properly researched the target audience, target persona, geography, company size to make sure we were reaching out to the right people who will benefit from our webinar and company offerings. All this helped us to get impressive conversion rates across registration, attendance, appointments, marketing, sales.
- Appropriate Landing Page
Webinar landing pages should be to the point and marketing-content-centric. They should clearly outline the objectives of conducting the webinar, discussion points, and key takeaways for the registrants. This will help to generate real interest in the audience.
- Repurpose webinars through Content Assets
It is vital to capture your audience’s attention even after the initial event. Repurposing the content in other formats works well. Different formats can appeal to an immense range of people with different preferences. The trick is to work smarter, not harder!
Blogs
Having published 41 blogs over 6 months, I am convinced that blogs can spike the registrations. In my experience, 20% of people have registered for the webinar after reading the blog. Blogs should highlight the reason and need for conducting the webinar. They should also elaborate on the key takeaways specified on the landing page.
Whitepaper/Handbook
Having published 6 relevant whitepapers and 1 eBook, I have realized the importance of curating a relatable whitepaper or handbook that the audience can use in their professional work. Or you can take the opposite course, and use a newly published white paper as the basis for your webinar.
Social media
People have short attention spans. They tend to tune out of activities that feel routine. We kept our prospects suitably engaged by mixing things on different social media formats like shooting a crisp video for social media promotion or creating a cool Insta hashtag.
Post webinar Campaigns
There’s nothing like “be done with it and put it behind”. It is important to continually revisit, evaluate and report to ensure results. Here are some things we took care of:
- Appointment booking for people interested in talking to the company
- Post webinar survey to understand the usefulness of webinar for audience
- Access/ Download Presentation and webinar video campaigns
- Suggestions/recommendations for the next webinar
Conclusion
Webinars can help create a purposeful experience that audiences love by merging live interactions with minimal cost, high reach, all directed to get results. The meaningful, personalized webinar content is the new touchstone. The best approach meticulously targets your audience and then benefits them with easily accessible, relevant webinars.
